The lanes were shut down for a total of four days. The Port Authority controls the bridge, and gave the order to shut down the lanes. And the members of the Port Authority are appointed by Chris Christie.

So now the New Jersey legislature is holding hearings, and it sounds like there’s very little paperwork documenting exactly why the Port Authority decided to hold a traffic study on one of the busiest days of the year. It also sounds like there’s a lot of…obfuscation, shall we say?

On the one hand, I want to give this the “NYT covers a Republican politician” discount. On the other hand, there seems to be no dispute that three access lanes to the busiest bridge in the United States were closed for four days, and not for emergency repairs. That to me is simply inexcusable; in a case like this, I would support individuals taking it upon themselves to reopen the “closed” lanes, as well as the liberal application of tar and feathers.

Speaking of tar and feathers, here are some excerpts from yesterday’s testimony in the Kelly Thomas trial that are designed to enrage you:

They tried to intimidate an FBI agent? Does LACSD make it a practice to hire and promote deputies who are dumber than a bag of hair?

For a while now, I’ve felt like the HouChron is trying to become more like BuzzFeed; if you look at their website, there’s a huge emphasis on slideshows and listicles. I generally don’t like linking to that crap (though the slide shows of fair food are often interesting) but here’s an exception: historical photos of Bonnie and Clyde. The HouChron isn’t kidding around with the “graphic photos” warning, either; there are a couple of photos of Bonnie and Clyde after the shootout. (There’s also some nice photos of a couple of their guns, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

(Yeah, it is tied to the mini-series, which I didn’t watch, but the photos are still interesting on their own.)

I keep thinking of these as “Egyptian”, but they’re not, really: they’re Art Deco.

These are a couple of the pylons, known as the “Guardians of Traffic”, at the ends of the Hope Memorial Bridge in downtown Cleveland. (AKA the “Lorain-Carnegie Bridge”.) We drove across this bridge several times, since it is the best route to the Westside Market. (“The bridge connects Lorain Avenue on Cleveland’s west side and Carnegie Avenue on the east side, terminating just short of Progressive Field.” Heh. My mother observed that everywhere we went in Cleveland, it seemed like we had to drive past Progressive Field. By the end of the trip, she was rather tired of it. In comparison, I think we drove past Browns Stadium twice, and Quicken Loans Arena once.)

The “Hope” in “Hope Memorial” is William Henry Hope, Bob Hope’s father. Mr. Hope was a stonemason who worked on the pylons when the bridge was built.

A reliable source tells me:

When the Cavs were in the playoffs, the city put Cavs sweatbands on the foreheads of the two closest to the Q, where the Cavs play.

There’s really no good place to park near the bridge and the pylons, so these photos were taken either with the iPhone camera or compact cameras, by myself and my mother, out of or through the windows of a moving rental car, while trying not to obstruct traffic. If I get a chance to go back and the weather is nice, I plan to get some better pictures with the big camera.

Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…

19 people were killed when one of the buses crashed. 16 of them were teenagers. This is one of those bits of Austin history that I was previously unaware of; I commend the Statesman story (and the sidebar about how horrible the highway bridge was) to your attention.

At least 90% of the time (if not more), when someone tells me “you shouldn’t burn bridges”, that person has just finished pouring gasoline all over the structure in question, and is now standing in the middle of the bridge flicking their Zippo.

Frankly, yeah, I can see eating tiger shrimp. The Asian Carp…well, it makes me think of the old joke about how to prepare carp. (Nail it to a board, prop it in front of a fire until one side turns black, turn the board over and wait until the other side turns black, then throw the fish away and eat the board.) I’m not a big chili fan, but nutria bourguignon could be interesting. And as for feral hogs, let me just say two words: feral bacon.

The Texas Department of Transportation has been building a couple of additional “flyover” connections down south of town; specifically, at the intersection of Loop 1 (also known locally as “MoPac”) and U.S. Highway 290.

Edited to add 7/19: Here’s a link to another Statesman story. If you look at both that story, and the blog post I linked to yesterday, neither one currently contains any mention of bankruptcy. (The Statesman blog post appears to have been revised sometime after my original post.)

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